


Two Stars Aligned

by OccasionallyCreative



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015), Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Canon Universe, Canon-Typical Violence, Enemies to Lovers, F/M, Force Bond (Star Wars), That's Not How The Force Works
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-30
Updated: 2017-09-30
Packaged: 2018-12-23 11:01:45
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 7
Words: 19,089
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11988459
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/OccasionallyCreative/pseuds/OccasionallyCreative
Summary: "star." /stɑː/(noun.)1. a fixed luminous point in the night sky which is a large, remote incandescent body like the sun.2. a planet, constellation, or configuration regarded as influencing a person's fortunes or personality."Whatever the connection they had, whatever line linked them, it was dangerous to think around the scavenger."After Kylo Ren tracks Rey and Luke Skywalker to the Force planet of Ossus and battles them, he wakes in the seat of a stolen TIE fighter to find himself now Rey's captive.





	1. Prologue

**Author's Note:**

> I'm very honoured to be a part of the second instalment of Reylo Fanfiction Anthology, “Celebrate the Waking”. This is my humble contribution, revolving around the celebration of ‘Birth/Birthday’. In writing, I decided to approach the celebration from a metaphorical angle, rather than a literal one, and this is the result: my attempt at a redemption arc.

The sun was high on D’Qar when the Falcon blotted it out. Leia ventured closer to the landing pad, others following in her wake. All of them stared at the legendary ship like a newborn looked to their mother.

The ramp opened with a hiss of steam.

Leia had become, over the years, so used to that cocky grin, that jacket. For a moment, she registered the wounds but not the face. Her mind simply replaced it with Han’s cocksure grin. Then Luke’s voice entered her head— _Leia_ —grasping for her, and she moved forward. Reaching him, she slid herself underneath her brother’s outstretched arm and took his weight.

Together, they hobbled through the silent, awed crowd.

They didn’t verbally speak until he sat in the infirmary behind flimsy plastic. Doctor Kalonia, as she did with all patients, calmly looked over his wounds and tutted. Her wise eyes had sparked momentarily with excitement when she’d seen him, but Leia was glad to see her faith rewarded when Kalonia straightened her back, going about her business like he was another foot soldier.

“What happened?” Leia asked. He was perched on the edge of the examination table, doing up the buttons of his borrowed Resistance uniform. His robes had been beyond repair, burned and tattered from battle.

Luke looked up at her question. Leia blinked, swallowing a smile. He was so small in the uniform, so shrunken for a moment that the lines around his eyes disappeared and he was young again. Then he ran his fingers through his grey hair, stroked his beard, and the illusion was gone.

“Tell me you felt it,” he said softly. She felt around in the Force for his meaning. It had been so long since she actively used the Force in that way, for that protracted length of time, she was stinging and aching from it. Soon she knew. She nodded and pulled up a chair, sitting opposite him.

“I did – but not when I first met her,” she said, her eyes twinkling, “You are the more intuitive of us.”

Tell the truth, it was always Han out of the three of them who had followed instinct, for better or worse, but her brother sat before her and he was broken, being put back together. She couldn’t, didn't wish to, open so fresh a wound.

“I took her to Ossus,” he said after some silence. Leia half-knew that planet from idle mentions outside of the civil war of the Galactic Senate, when his academy was a budding idea. He said it had been fresh and green, peaceful outside of the politics and the aftermath of the battle. Luke sighed.

“I hoped she would find something among the ruins that could help her – understand. Leia, he—” Luke avoided her eyes, staring at the wall behind her, “he found us. Fought us. When I woke, I was alone. I climbed into the Falcon and came to the only place I could.”

Leia slipped her fingers between his gloved one, feeling the hard machinery underneath the leather.

“Luke,” she said softly. Her brother spoke with not yet expressed grief, and years of regret. “You must tell me what happened. The Resistance will help.”

Luke shook his head. He squeezed her hand tighter. All at once, she felt it; something much bigger than her brother, than Rey, than her son. Trepidation grew in her blood.

“The Force is waiting,” her brother murmured. “For what, I don’t yet know. But it’s so much bigger, Leia. So much bigger than I ever believed.”

* * *

_You’re a monster—the island, I see the island—Han Solo—Han Solo can’t save you—_

All whispers, detached and disconnected, their voices blurred into the same singular hush. Engines hummed underneath him, but they weren't the deep, discombobulating hum of the Finalizer. They were lighter in weight, higher in pitch.

“Scavenger,” he breathed, rolling his head to the side. He squeezed his eyes shut. Despite his training, despite all he had learned, he had been the one defeated. He clenched his fists.

Kylo slowly opened his eyes. His blood ran cold. His body froze with the realisation of what surrounded him. The cabin of a TIE fighter. A _stolen_ TIE fighter.

Behind the high rounded pane of glass were the stars of the Outer Rim, with Ossus and the Deep Core far behind. He must’ve been out for hours. The realisation gnawed at him.

“Scavenger…” he repeated. No reply. He glanced over the array of ammunition before him. Missiles, cannons, mag pulses. One toggle on his left allowed him to switch between all three, a sight on his right allowed for aim.

“Where are we going?” he asked into the still present silence. All that training under Snoke. Hours, defeated and triumphant, all for nothing. And throughout, she’d haunted him.

He sensed the scavenger now, shining silver and new, bitter with determination. He dipped into her head. She flinched, pushing back, edging him away from her thoughts, but he saw it. The cliffs, the ocean of Ahch-To. That was it then. That was her plan now she had captured him.

Kylo gave a short laugh, a bitter hollow one. “Desperation doesn’t suit you scavenger.”

“It's not desperation,” she snapped. He felt her anger like it was his own. She felt like she did as a child, held back by Unkar Plutt, screaming at the top of her lungs. “You're the one who lost.”

“You’ve no-one!” Kylo barked. The image of Ahch-To still permeated his head. She saw it in water and sunlight, but his memory took over the image of it in his head. In his memory, he saw only fire and ash. “Not even your precious master.”

“My master—” There were fat tears rolling down her cheeks, white hot with her anger. Even the echoes, running down his face from dry eyes, burned his flesh.

Over them, a starship entered out of hyperspace. Kylo peered up through the rounded glass, and a grin tugged at the corner of his lips. His tracker was undetected by her then, if Hux could find the scavenger this quickly.

The Finalizer slowly approached. Its silhouette fell over the fighter, and the planet below. The scavenger’s panic spiked through the Force. Kylo’s grin widened.

A fleet of TIE fighters scattered over the stars, rapidly approaching them. Their speed slowed as they surrounded them.

“Give up,” Kylo snarled. “You have nowhere to go.”

Behind him, she breathed hard. The panels before him bleeped and lit up. Kylo frowned. The Force moved around, tracing over the weaponry. The toggle moved, slowly, like a child doing something for the first time. Kylo gripped it, bringing it to its centre, pushing at her use of the Force.

A yelp from the scavenger and the connection was broken. Letting go of the toggle, Kylo laughed.

“Bind me next time,” he said.

She was determined; he had to confess that about her. If she focused her power, like his Knights, she could be dressed in black. Stood by his side, his apprentice, his equal—

The whole fighter tilted downwards until Kylo saw the underbelly of the Finalizer.

His laugh became a growl, the growl becoming a roar as the scavenger pushed the vessel down, down the path of the stars, out of the shadow of the Finalizer. The TIEs gave chase, crowding their vessel.

“Stop this!” Kylo screamed among the melee, “You've nowhere to go!”

A missile shot, a single punishment for the scavenger’s resistance, hit their left wing.

Tumbling, tumbling, falling and spinning. She yowled some guttural desperation to right the ship as they fell to the planet below. Kylo looked beyond the rounded glass, up at the rapidly shrinking First Order and down at the planet. It was blue, swirling, perfect.

He closed his eyes.


	2. Chapter One

The wind was warm. Temperate. Strands of her hair caught in the breeze, swirling against her cheeks and lips. For a moment it was another unchanging night on Jakku, she was sat in the sand and watching the ships taking off, landing. Wondering if, perhaps, one of them contained her family. Wondering how many more scratches she must mark.

Rey batted her eyes open, taking in the sun above. The acrid scent of the smoke. Beeps and sparks of failing machinery. TIE fighter pilots, flung forward on impact out of their ships and lying awkwardly like in a restless sleep among long grass. One’s helmet had cracked and split. She saw their mouth open against the grass, with blood glossed over the teeth.

How willing they were to chase her down, die for the First Order.

Her vision clearing, Rey’s hands flew to her safety belt. She undid it and nimbly climbed from the cockpit, rolling onto her back among the grass.

The wind picked up, batting her clothes against her form, stinging her wounds. With a groan, she shifted, sitting up. The Force had been with her. She was barely wounded, with only bruises on her legs and scratches on her face and arms. Rey sighed, burying her face in her hands, brushing her fingers through her hair.

A familiar kind of despair touched her mind.

 _Ha, kid. Careful there._ A grin, and black curls, little hands batting the air. A bed below and the soft air of a city blowing through an open window. _You still got a lot to learn._

Rey frowned, gingerly standing up.

“Han?” Impossible. But she knew of memories. She knew how they manifested themselves in the Force. Pictures, snatches of words and sentences thought forgotten but simply buried away. Rey stepped forward, wincing. A pain permeated her left foot. Lifting the weight off of it, she limped towards her fallen TIE fighter. Their fallen TIE fighter.

Ten others were scattered around the valley, and her eyes picked up more bodies, strewn amongst the grass and slumped in their seats.

She crept around to the armourer’s seat.

The glass was shattered. Kylo Ren sat slumped, limp and still, in the seat. His safety belt was still on, and blood dripped from his mouth. Her heart beat fast, but somehow, she knew he wasn’t dead. Something in the Force would’ve changed, she would have felt it.

(After all, she felt every strike of his lightsaber and the burn of every injury they inflicted on one another. Each of those blows was harder than the last; she didn’t dare think what the blow would be like if one of them finally, finally bested the other in combat.)

She reached forward and undid the safety belt.

Ren’s eyes snapped open. Rey flinched back, ready to grab her saber or stumble back onto the grass, waiting for him to begin the battle.

His mouth curled into a snarl. The cut on his bottom lip bled more as he prepared to speak.

She grabbed the saber at her hip and thumbed it on. Ren paused as she held it to his throat. The blue hummed. His dark eyes were reflected white by the hue.

For a moment, she regarded him with the hate with which he viewed her. It was an empty contempt, mismatched with the pain of his injuries flooding into his thoughts, and hers. She, or Luke, had wounded him badly on Ossus. A strike to his gut had marked his skin, burned away part of his robes and left his torso bare, displaying the wound for all to see. He wore no cape now; it had been abandoned during their battle.

“I could leave you here,” she said. Restrain him, trap him with the Force and leave him. Ren laughed. The sound was deep and silken where she expected high and strained. Every encounter they’d shared, he had been this way; nothing about him matched. He was simply a collection of broken things.

“Not exactly the honourable thing to do, not for a Jedi,” replied Ren. Rey’s anger spiked at his words. She jerked the lightsaber closer to his chin, and he tilted his head up, avoiding the threat. He looked like his mother when she was faced with opposition, seeking violence instead of peace.

Rey clenched her free hand tight into a fist, breathing hard.

She retracted her lightsaber, attaching it back at her hip.

“I’m not a Jedi,” she said, turning on her heel. “Nor am I a scavenger.”

She threaded her path through the fallen pilots and ships, all scorched with the entry into the planet’s atmosphere. Her arms slammed against her sides, and her whole body quivered, trapped.

Force bind.

Behind her, she heard hissed groans, curses foreign to her ears, then his footsteps. She battled against the bind, trying to take a step forward. The bind strengthened, seeping past her clothes and her skin to trap the muscles her legs and arms.

Ren circled her until he stood opposite her.

She fought the bind harder, but she could only gasp noiselessly as it held firm. Ren’s split lip curved into a dangerous smile.

It widened as he glanced over the valley. His eyes skipped over her as he scanned the landscape behind her before his attention made its laconic return to her. His smile turned wry.

“I’ve been to this planet before,” he said. He winced, lightly brushing his gloved hand over the wound to his gut. The cut from the lightsaber, Rey observed, was shallow. Deeper and his guts would’ve spilt out. (She slammed a door on that thought.) “There’s a network of caves on this planet. One is large enough to hold a small freighter.”

He dropped the bind. Her trembling legs collapsed underneath her, and she crumpled down to her knees, before his feet. Rey pressed her hand into the grass as she gulped back swathes of crisp air and the scent of smoke.

Ren dropped into a crouch before her.

“Ever captured someone before, scavenger?”

Rey lifted her brow and found his eyes. Her mouth turned downwards, a dark frown.

Even without the Force, she would know his plan. Find the caves, find a ship, steal the ship and fly off whatever rock they had landed on. His arrogance thread through her animosity. Her fingers curled against the grass into a fist.

The more he felt her hatred, the less he would know her thoughts. She would make it a vivid thing, a snarling spitting creature. Behind that wall, she rapidly made plans. She would go along with his plan. Subdue him then, and take him to General Organa. It was not her place to make the punishment, but the Resistance.

If she punished him now, she would be no better than the Jedi of old.

Rey shook her head, breaking the connection. Her eyes, raking over her clenched fist and the grass between her fingers, flicked back up to him.

His look was passive. He held out a hand. She took it and stood.

“West,” she said, and west they went.

* * *

He waited until it was her turn to sleep in the small spot they had made their camp before he let his thoughts wander. Whatever connection they had, whatever line linked them, it was dangerous to think around the scavenger. She had infected him since the interrogation on Starkiller and part of him hated her for it. At first, it had been a capsule, his hatred of the scavenger, his whole purpose poured into it. Yet with every defeat, every victory on both sides, it had become a goal not to battle but simply find her. For him, for the First Order. Find the girl and they would find the Resistance.

But the scavenger was clever. She led them all a merry dance alongside Skywalker, led him to far-flung places deep within the Outer Rim and the Deep Core. He had to wonder if she had planned it all. To chip away at his purpose until it was a minute part of him and the rest a nebulous separate.

He glanced down at his palm, where he cradled his lightsaber, brushing his thumb over the hilt, the place where he knew the crystal lay. The heart of it, cracked. Even his power, Snoke had told him, could not be contained by a mere kyber crystal.

Kylo sighed. He let his saber tumble from his fingers onto the grass.

Sometimes he wished he could stop the madness. This nonsense that made Snoke look at him like he had come from the lowest levels of Coruscant.

He pushed his hair back from his face. The night wind, stickier than the day’s, brushed over his forehead.

“We’ll stop here.”

Kylo tilted his head in the direction of the sound. Basic came from the east, a few metres away. Gruff like a Peroenian. The Shorak, though no less brutal, were softer in their speech. _They think it makes them better than those Peroes,_ explained a memory, bleeding from its box. Kylo shook his head.

“Not now,” he said under his breath. He grabbed his lightsaber and slowly stood, inching towards the sound.

“You think we’ll see Brintak? I hate them. I heard they tear your flesh off, skin you alive. Only then do they gnaw into your bones. They leave the heart for last.” The second voice was higher, younger and eager than the first, but carried the Peroenian gruff.

“That kind of sight would send any creature, Shorak or Peroenian, so mad they wouldn’t be able to tell those kind of stories,” the first voice barked in response. “Shut up and sleep.”

If Brintak was all that concerned them, then they hadn’t encountered the crash site in the north valley. Kylo dropped to a crouch, peering through the trees.

The group were five, all pale-skinned, one of typically skinny build and the others muscular for their breed. They wore leather and rags, and they all carried the Peroenian hair, a dirtied pale grey-yellow. Still talking, they sat just on the edge of the forest with the stars high above them.

Above, a rustling. Kylo flicked his eyes up, scanning the dark branches. Brintak. Kylo glanced over his shoulder at the scavenger. His captor _._ Her grey jacket was her pillow, and her hands were tucked underneath her cheek.

She was lucky the Brintak were only curious tonight.

He brought his attention back to the Peroenians. He watched them talk. One whispered something, gestured, and the four others laughed uproariously. One honked in his humour.

Kylo returned through the trees to the scavenger.

She was laid on her side but awake on his return. He found her hugging her knees. She craned her neck to look in the direction he had gone. Kylo sat cross-legged in the grass, letting his robes fall either side of his legs. The material chafed at his wound. He pressed his palm against the skin, willing the pain to leave.

The scavenger was looking at him.

“Concerned?” he asked.

“Pleased,” she bit back. He grinned. The pain from his wound snaked up through his body, clearing his eyes of sleep. For the time being, fatigue faded.

He listened to the scavenger lie in the grass. Her little sighs, moans, the general habits everyone had when they made themselves sleep.

Her shallow breaths told him she wasn’t really asleep at all.

Kylo switched, for the next few hours, between half-listening to the Peroenian group and her sleeping. As the night’s heat wore on her breaths became deeper, the heat familiar to her no doubt, until they were practically nothing at all, her slumber mixing in with the humid breeze.

The Peroenian group, as it neared Giaca’s dawn, moved off north in the direction of the station. Presumably to bargain and glean a peek behind its high walls. Kylo shifted away from his spot, crawling towards where the scavenger slept. As she’d slipped further down, her whole body had become tighter; it had curled up within itself, her legs brought up to her chest and her arms held tight around her arms. Her eyelids flickered rapidly. Dreaming.

Kylo sank onto the grass, lying on his back.

Now dawn approached, the branches were discernible from the shapes of Brintak. Their hulking masses moved with grace from branch to branch, the leaves always rustling while they jumped and swung, their silhouettes lit white by their rows and rows of teeth sharp enough to pierce any bone. They hissed, the barb-tipped tentacles at the side of their heads sliding out from the shadows, curious about what prey could be caught.

Finding nothing, as Kylo lay still and the scavenger slept (on Jakku, perhaps, the dangers were enough that she learned to sleep through them), the multiple Brintak retreated into the home of hollowed out tree trunks.

Kylo closed his eyes. Giaca’s single yellow sun was beginning its slow, slow approach over the horizon. Sunlight scattered through the toroc trees.

The crash of waves filled his ears. Salt on his tongue, hard rock underneath his gloved palm.

Ah.

On one knee, he knelt before Ahch-To at the bottom of its ancient stone steps. His fingers were outstretched on the rocky surface. His cape flapped out behind him. Tilting his head up, he felt the direction of the breeze. It whipped past him, whistling over the cliff face. The whole island loomed above him and his fighter. He stood and made his way up. His lightsaber crackled red in his palm. There was no thought in his mind of stopping. Of turning back.

He reached the top, and there she was. Sleeping still on Giaca, but moving here. Throwing the sharp blue blade of his grandfather’s this way and that in smooth arcs and jabs. The ocean glittered blue behind her. In front of her, her master. His uncle.

Kylo snarled. His thumb moved over the hilt of his lightsaber.

It crackled red, sparks landing on the damp stone and dying.

“Rey,” said his uncle, drawing back his sand-coloured hood, catching her attention. She whirled around. Her brown eyes matched the flushed cheek, Kylo noted. They shone with the effort of training, channelling the Force.

All at once, they were in a cave. Her hand—his hand, their shared hand—touched a page. Their breaths hitched in their throat, as their fingers brushed over the ancient ink.

A snowflake, on her forefinger.

They frowned. They brought their hand closer and examined the thing. A snowflake. Another, as they turned their hand upwards towards the sky of the cave. Snow on their tongue as they looked up, watching the flurry surround them.

A rumbling and the walls of the cave, their master at their side, all crumbled.

“What’s happening?” they cried, in one voice, stumbling back then running forward, on another planet. Their legs pushed a path through the snow of the base—Starkiller Base, were their thoughts, _you should’ve killed him, why didn’t you kill him_ —and they called one name.

“Finn!” Their voice echoed. They found him lying unconscious. Dead, he might be dead—he can’t be dead, not him, not Finn— their hands stained with blood as they tried and attend to him—

Brown eyes snapped open. The scavenger, awake in the risen dawn, snarled. Her upper lip curled. With a Loth-cat grace, she scrambled for him. Kylo rolled out of the way, shaking his head of her dream. On all fours, she glared at him as he lay on his side, his upper body propped up by his hands in the grass.

She was the one that stood. He followed rapidly. Her body was already in the stance of an upcoming duel. Her fists clenched. Her breaths heavy.

It was not her saber that she used.

Her Force signature pushed forward. Kylo gasped, his head thrown back. Behind both of their eyes, his mother cooed over his infant form. He cried and cried, until she scooped him up into her arms and settled him, fat pink baby him, against her chest. Her eyes. Brown, like the earth of Chandrila, with the strength of durasteel. She looked down upon him in her arms with that strength. A fighter, her mouth moved the shapes of the words but the voice was lost to the image.

Wretched scavenger!

Kylo flung forward his hand, circling the Force around her neck. She gasped and gaped. Her neck contorted and twisted, the weight of his choke bearing down on her. It bore down on him too, he realised. His gut wound gnarled and twisted; pain, pain, pain—Kylo growled and flung the weight of his power behind the choke. The girl needed to learn the value of discretion.

The pain in his gut still soared. Above all, the Force, the scavenger. Kylo’s body trembled and wobbled.

He couldn’t hold her. The more he held her, the more his wound sank past skin deep and into his blood. He stared at the scavenger. She was fighting valiantly, her back arched and her left hand outstretched as she tried to pay him back in kind.

He withdrew. She coughed, gaining back her breaths. He expected her to speak with rage as her cough faded away and her composure returned. Expected her to light her saber and attempt to injure him in revenge, or recompense.

“You think of your mother.”

Those were her only words in the silence, as leaves fell around them, fluttering in the wind. She swung her eyes up to stare at him. Examining him. Kylo turned on his heel. He scanned the horizon through the trees. It had to be midday now.

He glanced down. He brushed a leaf from the toe of his boot.

“It’ll be best if we stay out of one another’s heads,” he said. He edged closer to the forest’s edge, glancing west.

“You’re always in my head.”

Kylo whipped round. His captor was busying herself, unfolding her grey jacket. She picked up her lightsaber from underneath it and slid it into the holster around her hips. She slid the grey jacket onto her shoulders.

“You’re in mine,” Kylo replied. It was not a great truth, only a matter of fact. He nodded out to the horizon. “So, I suppose we continue west?”

His knee underneath him buckled.

The world underneath him swirled. It fell into slow motion. Up, down. Landscape, portrait. His cheek pressed into warm, soft grass. Flakes of old blood touched his tongue.

The burning began. A burn like a slow fire at the end of the night, that he’d sat before on Chandrila when his mother negotiated until the dawn, and his father watched him out of the corner of his eye. It licked over his torso, wrapped around his neck and brushed the hollow of his cheeks.

It was difficult to tell what was real. The fire; his father’s eye; the hands of the scavenger, tugging him towards her. The grass on his back, or the voice of his mother.

A palm cracked against his cheek. Kylo blinked. The world stopped moving, stopped shifting. Reality looked him plainly in the face.

Reality wasn’t a beauty, but hard-edged by sand and sea and rocks. Her brown eyes narrowed as they scanned his body. Her fingers tore off his tunic, leaving him with only the black undershirt.

“Hell,” she breathed. His eyelids fluttered as he glanced down. Her fingertips were dipped in blood. Fresh and old. Her eyes found his.

“You’re my captive, Ren. And we’ll go west when I say.”

Despite the surety in her tone, her hands hesitated to touch his wound. With a hard breath, she pressed her hands to it, the cauterised edges. Kylo hissed as warmth flooded him. His hearing focused on one sound. Her slow meditative breaths. Blue shadows flooded from her palms in wisps of spirits and smoke.

West. West they would go.


	3. Chapter Two

After the Peroenians ambushed them, they took turns hitting Kylo until he had no energy to get back up. Even then, they punched him still, making him bleed more. It was their punishment for being a Force user. An outlander, scum. One of the thugs pressed his hand into Rey’s neck, keeping her still and knelt over in the long grass, her cheek pressed to the ground. She smelt the dirt and his blood and remembered how Ren had looked at her on Ossus. With such fascination and she had felt it within him, deeper than ever. The crack, jagged and ever wider. Crumbling with every strike of his lightsaber to hers, and every battle fought.

Perhaps that was why she had captured him.

Rey wriggled desperately against the tight grip of her captor. They wanted her to watch. Learn the lesson.

Kill a Peroenian, as Kylo had, they would hurt in return. They spat at him as they kicked. Rey winced, which somehow became a gasp, which became a plea.

“Stop—” she panted, feeling every blow they gave to him, “stop it.”

The Peroenian holding her chuckled. The thugs called him Cole; he had been the first one they’d seen. Slipped from between the thick forest, he’d smirked and bragged and set his four thugs on them. Rey had dodged, dived, just as she had on Jakku. They’d been quicker.

“Enough,” he ordered from above.

Perhaps they thought her precious to him.

Maybe they thought he was precious to her.

The Peroenian let her go. He straightened up. He gestured to Ren’s unconscious form. “Beat him more and we’ll have lost a good bounty. They will pay more knowing they have the First Order’s enforcer in their possession.”

Rey glanced over her shoulder at the nest of trees behind them. She had let her lightsaber fall from her palm when she’d seen the lightning-quick first punch they’d laid on Kylo while one of their own screamed above, carried off by a Brintak.

They cuffed them both, and two of the thugs carried his unconscious body. Cole led the way. Over the hill, down into the next shallow valley, they marched towards their ship. It was a small transporter, designed before the First Order, before the Empire. Hauling Ren’s body into the loading bay, they bundled her inside it, pushing her up the ramp into the loading bay.

“Stay there,” Cole ordered, pushing her against the wall of the ship. He slammed a button. The ramp slowly closed as Cole climbed a ladder towards the upper level of the cockpit. The ship soon pulled up into the air while the remaining four Peroenians remained in the loading bay. Rey sank down to the floor, sitting with her knees tucked to her chest. She kept her head bowed. Two of the thugs muttered as they examined Ren’s unconscious body, fingers raking over his clothes and patting him down. One of them paused. Rey glanced up. He had his hand at the belt around Ren’s robes. The second thug frowned.

“Wolf. What is it?”

There was a  _ click _ , and the thug, Wolf, held in his hand a tracker. “Little sithspawn had this,” he spat.

“Precious bounty,” replied the second thug.

Wolf deactivated the tracker, throwing it on the ship floor.

“ _ Our _ bounty.”

The two other Peroenians sneered, examining the rest of their haul. Crates of off-planet food and spice. Weaponry too, blaster pistols and rifles. Rey waited until the four Peroenians were gathered together, laughing over jokes with their backs to them, she and Ren classed as nothing more than more cargo. Turning her right hand palm upwards, she summoned the Force. The tracker flew into her palm. She quickly hid it under her shirt, clicking it against the waistband of her trousers. She leaned back against the ship’s wall, breathing a sigh.

She knew why she couldn’t hate her life on Jakku, however much she tried. It had taught her how to survive.

* * *

The planet of Odessen was a cascade of blue and white. Poe Dameron, looking down upon it, sighed.

“Gotta hope this is the one, BB-8,” he said. His droid’s beeps were optimistic, and Poe smiled in spite of himself. He switched on the comms unit. “Okay guys, Odessen. Follow me, we’ll land on the west side and spread out from there. You copy?”

“Copy Black Leader,” came the replies, and their call signs. Snap, Jess, Karé. Poe focused his sights of the western side of the planet. Approaching the planet, their landing was swift. BB-8 beeped as Poe climbed from his ship and sank down onto the grass. The undergrowth here was tall, waist high. Poe ran his fingers over the blades. They were wet with morning dew and the remains of recent rain.

“So, planet number five,” Jess said with a grin, setting her blaster as she came to stand at Poe’s side.

“Odessen,” Snap supplied. “Got to admit, there’s not much recent information I could find about this place. Apparently got wildlife, so look out for that on the scanners.”

Poe nodded at Snap’s words, taking in the landscape. There was an odd feel to this rock. It was different to the ones they’d visited before. Jess sniffed the air.

“You smell that?”

Poe nodded. It was more than the scent of the trees, or the grassy terrain. Far beyond, Poe saw the silhouette of mountain ranges. He heard the distant rush of ocean water.

He rolled his shoulders, gesturing.

“Jess, you’re with me. We’ll go north from here. Snap, Karé, you go east. BB-8, stay with the wings, okay? We’ll be back, buddy,” Poe added hurriedly, at BB-8’s mournful beep. Jess jogged to fall into step with him, looking over the scanner in her hands.

“Check comms,” Poe said, and Jess nodded.

“On it.”

Poe advanced forward, brushing through the undergrowth. 

“You got any signs of life yet?” he called back.

He glanced over his shoulder to see Jess examining the scanner. Her eyebrows dipped into a frown. “None whatsoever – no, wait a second. Think I’m getting a faint signal.”

Poe hurried back through the undergrowth to Jess’ side, his eyes reading the data on the scanner.

“About half a klick north of here,” Jess said, sticking out her arm, tilting it left as she followed the map. Poe grinned.

“C’mon.”

Jess managed to keep silent for at least ten minutes. Shoving her way through the high grass, the both of them coming to the end of a thick forest, she grinned up at Poe.

“Been thinking. Interesting that Black Squadron volunteered to do this search.”

“We’re reconnaissance, Jess. Plus it was a favour to the General. We’ve got a war to win – we can’t pour all our resources into one search.”

“Finn seemed pretty relieved when you volunteered—”

Poe whirled round, pointing a finger in Jess’ face. “ _ Hey. _ ”

Jess shrugged. Her brown eyes twinkled. “Just saying, cap.” Her voice dropped to a whisper, her tone singsong, as he turned round. “As is everyone on base…”

Poe shook his head. Best pilots in the galaxy, but they sure couldn’t keep their noses out of other people’s business. Trained too well to never be at least curious.

He paused. He sniffed the air. The scent was stronger again. The silence of the planet seemed to reverberate, like a heartbeat beneath his feet and inside his head. A slow, lingering heartbeat. Poe retreated, finding Jess’ eyes. She quirked an eyebrow.

“Cap? Poe?”

He nodded to the scanner still in her hands. “Check that signal again.”

“It’s still reading half a klick away – wait,”—she knocked the scanner against her palm—“We’ve been walking a lot longer than… I’m sure we have… No, we should be halfway by now.”

Poe pointed to the west of where he stood. “We need to go this way.”

“What?” Jess shouted after his retreating form. “Poe, the signal – Poe!”

“Don’t you feel that?” Poe said, turning on his heel to face her. “That – inside your head—”

“That’s just the air, Poe, c’mon—”

“It’s not the atmosphere, Jess.” Poe jogged through the undergrowth, parting it with his hands, edging further towards the forest. “It’s something else,” he muttered, stepping from the undergrowth into the trees. He crouched, felt the dirt under his palm. He cracked a smile. It felt warm, like the duracrete on D’Qar. Warm with the near-constant throbbing work of machinery. Ships or scanners, holodecks or comms units. Jess’ shadow fell over his face. Glancing at him, she followed his lead, gathering dirt into her palm, rubbing it between her fingers.

She frowned. “That’s weird.”

Rising to his feet, Poe tilted his head towards the intricate path between the trees. “C’mon.”

They walked through the leaves and dry earth. With every metre they covered, the temperature grew hotter. Their saliva felt sticky, the roofs of their mouths dry. Poe wiped sweat from his brow as they got closer to the edge of the trees. His vision swam. The heartbeat, that constant sound, had swelled. The same rhythm, over and over, in his ears and his head, running through his whole body.  Poe slid his hand into his holster, retrieving his blaster.

Jess’s hand flung out, stopping him in his path.

“What the hell—?” she whispered.

Poe blinked. His eyes refocused, following the direction of Jess’ gaze.

A dark concrete structure stood before them. Carved into the base of a mountain, it had high walls and two sharp slopes at either side. The concrete was crumbling, even as they stared at it, stones tripping off the brick. Moss enveloped the grey, the green of it reptilian vines that threaded over the structure.

Jess rubbed at her ear. “That sound – it’s gone.”

Poe nodded dumbly. “Uh-huh. Got your blaster?”

“Definitely.”

Holding his blaster pistol in one hand, he crept forward. The mouth of the structure was unlit. Water rushed distantly. The stone floor was damp. An ocean underneath stone. Light flooded the wide tunnel, Jess sweeping her torch left to right. Gaps in the stone led to the sight of rushing ocean tides. Their breath formed clouds in the increasing cold.

“Check comms,” Poe said. Together, they turned a corner into another wide path. The light of the torch picked up discarded technology. Ancient, cumbersome. Comms units that made up the weight of a whole backpack; wood utensils, chipped. Rusted metal, with cracked stones in their centre. He peered closer at them. Not stones. Crystals.

“Copy, Black Squadron, copy.” Jess sighed, tapping the comm unit against her palm. Her torch flickered, snapping on and off, flooding the dark with long-lit shadows. “Snap, Karé, come in. You there?”

“Supreme Leader, my news is grave.” The voice was distant, echoing down the corridor. Poe jumped to his feet. Jess followed as he jogged down the corridor towards the sound.

Getting closer, Poe slowed. The voice, human, was scratchy, garbled in places.

“What news?” He paused at the echoing second voice. It was unlike the first; full-bodied, a low growl more belonging to a creature than a human. Poe ducked low, moving forward, beckoning to Jess. His hold on his blaster tightened as he straightened, continuing towards the end of the corridor.

A medium-sized shuttle stood dormant in the middle of the corridor, its wings folded inwards. It looked small underneath the high square arched ceiling. Imperial design. Poe’s palms itched. He took a breath, running his eyes over it. The ramp underneath its belly was open.

A trap.

Whoever had this in their possession, they knew of their presence.

Poe ran forward and up the ramp. Slowing, he bent forwards, slipping through the corridors of the ship. Luxurious red seating was covered in dust; tables were scratched with age. The design had to be of the Clone Wars, if not older.

“… We were unable to find an exact—” The voice crackled with a harsh hiss, “location for Kylo Ren and the girl before his tracker was deactivated. But we know the planet. He is on Giaca. There is a slave presence there; it is most likely it was traders who deactivated the signal.”

“I see.” The sound came from a distant chamber, the entrance of which was an empty archway. Poe dropped to a crouch, hurrying closer. He tilted his head against the cold metal of the ship’s wall, straining to listen. He felt Jess beside him, her hand on his forearm. He slid his fingers between hers, squeezing tightly before letting go.

“We must retrieve Kylo Ren from Giaca as soon as we are able. My resources here are… depleted. How long before the First Order is ready to fight again? I recognise your last loss to the Resistance damaged us severely.” The voice was a taunt. Poe’s blood ran cold, then boiling hot. His body trembled with anger.

The First Order, here. On Odessen. He charged his blaster, holding it up. He counted his breaths as he listened.

“As long as the Resistance knows nothing of Ren’s location, we have all the time in the galaxy. We will amass enough firepower to take every last planet in the known systems, including Giaca. Then we shall strike D’Qar.”

“Very well, General Hux. When Kylo Ren is retrieved, you shall have permission to kill the scavenger. How you do it is your decision, but kill her and kill her quickly.” Jess hurried to the other side of the entrance, sinking down into a crouch. Poe peered round into the room. A full-figured holo of a man stood in the middle of the room, stiff-collared with slicked back hair, wearing proudly the uniform of the First Order. The technology was old, and the man’s features were ill-defined. All that could be seen was a permanent scorn and narrowed eyes.

Before the holo, there was a creature, almost human. Poe’s breath stilled for a moment. Snoke. Black robes covered his form, but his head was bald, scarred and sliced. When he moved, he walked slowly, as if walking itself was laborious. Snoke waved a dismissive hand as it continued to talk. “She has become a distraction. Distractions must be eliminated.”

The male in the holo nodded once. Sharp, crisp. “It shall be done, Supreme Leader.”

The holo flickered and died.

Poe stood, taking a hard breath. He caught Jess’s eye. She nodded. Bouncing on the balls of his feet, he sprang forward, running quickly into the room, aiming at Snoke. A single bolt from his pistol, shot towards the creature. Snoke spun around, staring into Poe’s eyes. The hollow of his right cheek was carved away, showing muscle and sinew and the white of bone. The bolt hovered in mid-air.

The second bolt, from Jess, coming in from the left, stopped dead too.

“So this is what has been left of the Resistance.” There were shadows underneath the hollow, aged eyes. Exhaustion permeated Snoke’s face. His mouth curved with a gruesome smile. “And this is what has been left of the First Order. I have spent much to avoid the eyes of your petty little rebellion.”

He raised his hand. His forefinger and middle finger were pressed together. Poe stumbled back, trying to run, but suddenly—he was trapped, his body caught and trembling in a frozen moment. He heard Jess, gasping with coming tears.

Snoke’s gruesome smile widened. He tilted his head and softly pressed his fingers to Poe’s forehead. Time caught up to his body; Poe slumped forward, falling to his knees. His throat swallowed up with gasps, harsh and drawn out.

“Jess?” he gasped. Snoke—Poe’s vision swam again, the room before him blurring, he shook his head, trying to right himself—circled around them, his robes gliding over the cold metal floor.

“Don’t bother. You shall soon forget you were ever here.”

“Poe…” Jess choked. “I can’t—”

Poe looked to her. Tears glimmered in her eyes, trailing down her cheeks. Poe squeezed his eyes tight, reaching up, cupping her face. Snoke—Hux—the girl, Rey—she was in danger, they were going to—going to…

“Hold on—” he panted, sinking his fingers into Jess’ hair. It was soft underneath his palms, like Dramassian silk—no, no, he had to remember! Hux. The girl, Rey. Snoke, on Odessen, the First Order. “Say it, we’ve got to remember. We’re the Resistance, Jess—”

“Snoke, Hux, Rey,” Jess chanted under her breath, like a prayer. Poe pressed his forehead to hers. Think, think. Remember. She had the air of D’Qar in her hair and her skin. Odessen—Odessen—

BB-8 beeped happily and rolled towards Poe as he and Jess appeared into the clearing from the undergrowth. Snap and Karé jogged up to meet them.

“You get any success?” Karé asked. “We searched, but couldn’t find any damn thing. Save for a nasty pack of shade stalkers, so we got out of there. Wexley, ever think our luck’s running out?”

“Not for men of action like us,” Snap replied, throwing her a wink. Karé rolled her eyes. Poe glanced to Jess with a playful look.

“And you think I’m bad at flirting. We found nothing, followed a path and found a dead end. C’mon. We need to report back to base.”

“First, let’s stop off at Maizie’s, I’m starving,” Karé threw over her shoulder, hurrying towards her X-wing. Poe laughed as BB-8 rolled ahead of him towards his ship.

“Why not?”


	4. Chapter Three

The ship flew over the grass of the rock. It was dusk, the sky tinted blue when they arrived at their destination. Cole pushed her hard off the ramp. Rey tumbled, rolling onto her back with a groan. Cole laughed, standing over her so that his feet were either side of her waist. Rey said nothing to amuse him further, gave no reaction.

Scoffing, he gripped her arm to pull her up. She wasn’t the gristle and bone of Jakku now, but Cole treated her like her doll, something to squeeze and push towards the column that stood high among the grass. He pushed on her shoulders when they reached it, and she knelt.

Docile, obedient. Fighting only when made to, with clumsy hurried blows. That was how she’d lived on Jakku. If her stomach rumbled, if she ached for family, she let it show in a slip of her mask, maybe, but Unkar liked to prey on weakness for his negotiations so she’d learned to keep the slips private, in the dark of her AT-AT.

Cole nudged the small of her back with the toe of his boot.

“This one’s good,” he said, scanning her like she were stock. He scanned Ren in the same way and shrugged. “Check the pet.”

Kylo was still unconscious. Every time he had shown signs of rousing, they’d made certain he wouldn’t get up. Rey flinched at each blow, and they said she needed fattening. She took that to mean they meant to think her a coward. Rey watched them through her eyelashes, following Cole’s movements as he joined Wolf in heaving Ren from the loading bay. They carried him, her prisoner, down the ramp and laid him down before the column.

The column was the basaltic black of Ahch-To’s caves, its height tall enough to be seen for miles. Rey tucked back a smirk. Perfect for a meeting point.

The wind picked up as she knelt. Dusk approached evening and the buyers finally came. They approached the column on another small transporter, as old in design as the Peroenians’ ship, but there were more of them.

Seven in all. They were more muscular than the Peroenians. They wore clothes of cotton robes, wrapped around their bodies and tied at the waist by a leather belt. The clothes moved with the wind, the hems flapping around their bare feet. Paint covered their arms, though the shapes of their tattoos were unfamiliar.

The leader of the arrivals approached Cole. Rey allowed herself a small glance at them. She was a lithe woman, with eyes of black. Her hair was a blazing dark red, a mixture of fire and blood.

“Outlander,” was her greeting. Cole twitched, his fingers brushing over the knife at his side. The woman rolled her eyes. “Do not reach for your knife. You could’ve killed me years ago, and selling to me has already lowered your honour enough among your breed.”

Rey lowered her eyes as the woman stepped forward. The woman’s pale skirts pooled around her bare feet as she crouched before Rey. Rey felt the woman’s long fingers clasp her chin. She tilted her head as the woman’s hand demanded, but kept her gaze lowered, focusing on the woman’s neck. It was longer than the Peroenian’s, more graceful. Her muscles were supple, smooth lines underneath her dark skin.

“She’s a fighter,” the woman said decisively. She moved on. Her feet standing in the grass next to Ren, Rey heard her chuckle, as if in knowledge.

“Kylo Ren,” she said softly, above Rey’s head. She reached out with her foot, pressing her heel to Ren’s cheek. She rolled his head until he looked up to the sky. Dried blood marked his cheeks and mouth and nose. His brow was scuffed and bruised. His scar trailed down his cheek and neck.

“He killed one of ours,” Cole snarled.

“And you give him to me to clean up,” the woman remarked. She stepped away from Ren, and returned to Cole. Her bare feet alone carried more authority than Cole’s hard leather boots. “Very well. 10 credits discounted for the beaten Force boy – and no negotiation.”

“No negotiation,” he said, with reluctance.

The woman turned on her heels, and there was a snap of her fingers. She spoke in an unfamiliar tongue. Rey stood, wordless, until they told her to move. She walked up the ramp into the loading bay, taking in her surroundings. The seven men and women loaded up the crates.

The second ship was not like that of the Peroenians. That was junk stitched together into one whole like her quadjumper on Jakku, and her staff. That lay forgotten now among Luke’s other trinkets—memories of his youth, side by side with General Organa and Han Solo. This was smooth-lined, built in mind of a culture, a clan. The ship’s walls were silver-grey, with no levels to the design. The cockpit was at the head of the ship, a thick strip of glass the pilot’s viewport.

Rey clenched her fists tight. She blankly ran her eyes over Ren’s battered body, lying in the cocoon of a med bay, lit white. Two men, dressed in white, both with intricate designs painted onto the skin of their hands, attended him. The woman, their leader, supervised them. The one on the left carried with him a satchel. From it, he brought medicine, bacta patches and gel.

“My name is Thassa, of Station 3Z3.” It was the one who had inspected her, had remarked upon Ren as a ‘boy’, who was speaking. Rey lifted her head to properly look at her.

Thassa approached, her arms crossed over her chest. She came to a stop before Rey.

“He is your enemy, I think.” Thassa smiled, her teeth a brilliant white when she chuckled. The soft edges of her eyes crinkled. “It’s in the way you regard him. We are the Shorak, the true species of this planet.”

Rey kept her eyes on Thassa. She was shorter, but her strength lay in her calm posture and the authority in her features. Her face was round-shaped, her lips delicate in their fullness. Wisps of thin material were wound around her upper arm in thin ropes, starting at her shoulder and coming to a point at her elbows. From there, tattoos took over. Circles and shaped vines began from an arrow shape, dancing across her skin, over the supple muscles of her forearms and past her hand to wrap around her fingers.

Thassa tapped her fingers in a rhythm against her thigh. The tattoos on the back of her hand shifted like an ocean wave.

She was older in years. Yet she was not like the elders of Jakku. Beaten by sun and sand and competition. It seemed to Rey, Thassa had grown all her life among greenery and trees.

“Rey,” she said, causing Thassa to look at her. Her eyebrows shot up, buried in her hairline. Rey cleared her throat. “Rey, of Jakku. Kylo Ren is my captive.”

Thassa quirked an eyebrow. Rey dropped her gaze, swallowing. She listened to the hum of the engines, and the soft mutter of the medics.

* * *

Cold shot through his bloodstream and for a moment, Kylo believed himself wounded again, and saw the scavenger, his  _ captor _ , knelt over him. He scoffed, rolling onto his side and propping himself up with his elbow. The ground underneath him was stone, and smelt of urine. His hair was soaked with water, clumped onto his neck and forehead. His hands, ungloved, were cold, too. Kylo blinked and glanced down his body. His chest was bare, his trousers brown cotton, tied at his waist with a rope of red fabric.

“You have our captors to thank for your life.”

Wiping his hair from his eyes, Kylo turned his head, searching.

He found her curled up on a single bench, tucked against the corner of the cell. She wore a long brown cotton tunic. Every muscle in her body was tense, taut, though she sat with her feet pressed into the stone floor and her knees pressed together. Alert.

She raised an eyebrow.

“They wasted all their bacta on you.”

Kylo lifted his fingers to his face, and the place where her eyes rested. His scar. The remnant of depleted resources, a symbol of his defeat, and the collapse of Starkiller. Kylo’s lip curled when he felt smooth skin where once he’d felt the bumps and ridges of his failure.

They would regret that soon enough.

_ That’s why you got beaten _ , hissed the scavenger, her voice wormed inside his head. His mind was filled with her images of the first blow, and the Peroenian caught in the tentacle of a Brintak.

“You underestimate the Force, scavenger,” Kylo snapped, climbing to his feet. There were no windows in the room, and only one door, sealed shut. “You always have.”

“I know these are the Shorak, and this is Station 3Z3.” The scavenger picked dirt from the fingernails of her left hand, flicking her eyes up to watch him. Kylo scoffed. He paced still the width of the floor. “What I don’t know,” added the scavenger, “is the name of this planet. Tell me.”

Kylo examined her. Her eyes were wide and inviting, a thread of cold sewed within it. He had little to lose giving over that piece of information.

“Giaca,” he said. It would take two fleets of Hux’s troopers to take this ancient station and rid the planet of the ancient rivalry. It would take him nothing, if he concentrated his will, use his power as he was destined to do, as Snoke told him he was fated to do, to do the same.

“I know what the Force is…”—he whirled on the scavenger, frowning in the face of her words—“I’ve learned what I needed to learn. It’s you who know nothing of it, Ren. The Force is not your ally. It is never your ally.”

“You have barely begun,” Kylo replied, bringing it back to the familiar. The Force was a weapon wielded by him, Snoke had told him such. It had made so much sense, to think of it as within his hands, a thing he could mould, rather than something that could mould him. His uncle, his mother, his father—they had all treated him as if he were destined to be attached to it, the only thing that defined him.

Every time they met, the scavenger spoke increasingly as if it was neither. As if the Force was neither a weapon nor a definition of a body but something that lived and breathed in its own space, and they were simply vessels to accommodate it. Such thoughts put him off-kilter, made his axis tilt until his head swam.

They scared him.

So he brought it back to the simplicity. The dark and the light. A conflict older than they. She, the light. Hardened by the ocean air, toned from training and knowledgeable, but with the naivety of the Light buried deep within.

Snoke would’ve delved inside, and plucked it out. He would’ve shown her the galaxy as it truly was; chaotic, shattered across stars and systems. The Force would bring it back together.

That was their routine. From planet to planet. Closer and closer, circling each other. Building up to something.

“They know who you are, Ren,” the scavenger said, a shattering of the silence between them and the routine. “If you fight them, you’ll die.”

A twinge ran over Kylo’s jaw. Bacta did much to erase the mistakes of the physical body. The mental body, however, the pulse that lived side by side with his blood, fractured at every failure. Even the scavenger, he was sure, carried scars. He reached out into the Force, searching.

She was intent on survival. On seeing this through to the end. Such were the burdens of a captor.

The door shunted and clicked behind him, and its motors creaked from lack of grease. This was a place drowned in years. When first he’d seen it, from the mouth of Maruuk’s Nook, it had seemed fresh and brilliant, dazzling underneath Giaca’s sun.

A broad-shouldered male, with rich blue hair, entered. He carried a blaster rifle on his shoulder, and his face was marked with a tattoo. He beckoned for them to follow.

Kylo glanced to the scavenger. The Force crackled and sparked within him, every fracture aching. He breathed and it mellowed. She was right. Better to obey and live now.

She led. He followed.

* * *

The jailer led them up shallow steps, through two sets of high arched doors that cranked and hissed, out to sunlight. Rey blinked, shading her eyes from the sun. It was a dust bowl, golden dirt surrounded by shallow levels of seating set in dark grey stone. Behind them, the doors cranked shut.

Eight outlanders stood in a line at the far end of the arena. Two Twi’leks looked to each other and no-one else. A human-like Bimm stood alone, its head bowed in peaceful compliance. The rest were humans outright, some skinny and undernourished, like she had once been. Others were clearly soldiers, with mouths already curled into a snarl, their hands ready for war. Rey walked forward as the jailer urged. She glanced at weapons arranged in a metal stand off to the side; each weapon gleamed, freshly cleaned and sharp.

Ren stared ahead as the jailer commanded them where to stand, how to stand. Rey felt the Force simmer between them, a roll of thunder before lightning. She began to turn to him, but hesitated. He’d found her eyes. Seen her gesture. He glanced down to her hand, halfway to his.

Rey snatched it away, tucking it behind her back.

The jail doors opened again. Thassa was no longer in the soft white robes in which Rey had met her, but a stiff collared shirt. On her hands, she wore black fingerless gloves. Her hair was tied back into a high braided bun by thick rope.

Thassa stopped before the line. She examined them all, passed muster on their forms and posture. The space between her brows creased with a frown. Her lips thinned.

“You are here to kill. You will kill.” She walked the length of the line. “First, you shall train. Your life will be nothing but training. When you are not training, you will eat and you shall sleep. Even then I expect you to be thinking of your training, and what it is you have still to learn. Those weapons there? As you become more skilled, you will get closer to choosing which weapon will be yours. Until then, you are children. And until you are reborn into a warrior worthy of us, you shall work with the weapons of children.”

Thassa clicked her fingers. The jailer and another walked forward, carrying carved weapons. Ageless designs, with patterns carved into the hilts of the wooden swords and the wooden bows. Only the rounded edges, the flat ends of the arrows and swords and spikes, stopped them from being lethal. They’d bring injuries, but not death. Rey doubted Thassa would let any battle training advance that far.

Thassa clicked her fingers again, aiming at the human on the far left. The human was a young woman, fair and brunette, and skinny. Her hair fell to her neck. She stepped forward.

“Pick a weapon.”

The woman nodded. As her fingers clasped the hilt of a sword, she paused. Her attention was caught by Ren. Rey held her hands at her waist. Hatred poured into the woman’s look. A bitter smile crept onto her lips.

She returned to the line. Ren looked to Rey.

“So much for not fighting,” he muttered. Rey slipped him a glare. He shrugged in return, and for a moment, he looked like his father. She bit back a smile.

One by one, each captive chose their weapon. The Bimm chose a bow and arrow set too large for him. The first of the two Twi’leks, green-skinned, chose a wooden mace.

The staff Rey chose and held between her fingers didn’t feel like her quarterstaff, weighted and without flex. It was lighter on one end than the other, and the wood was chipped from previous bouts. If she got caught in a fight, relied on her reactions more than her decisions, the blow wouldn’t land.

Contented, Thassa stepped back five paces. She rubbed her fingers together, thoughtful.

“Let’s truly see you. One strike means you’d be dead, if you weren’t children playing with toys. If you carry on after you’re out, I won’t take it as bravery, but as foolishness. Fight.”

_ Click. _ The sound of her fingers snapped and echoed.

The two Twi’leks ducked into forward rolls, one swiping out to the left, the other swiping out to the right. Both of them fought with balletic savagery, not the hard swings and thrusts of a Jedi.

The green-skinned Twi’lek felled the Bimm; the blue-skinned by her side lashed at the ankle of a male human with a wood handled whip. With a grunt, she tugged. The human male yelled out as he fell.

“Dead!” Thassa shouted. The green-skinned Twi’lek focused on Rey. There was a grin in her eyes. Slowly but surely, she swung the mace, every arc growing larger and larger. Rey dodged, moving rapidly back as the green-skinned Twi’lek swiftly bent, throwing the still swinging mace in her direction. Rey dodged again, falling into a defensive stance, her feet an equidistant apart. She felt the staff’s weight. It flexed as she swung out with a grunt, just scuffing the left side of the Twi’lek. Thassa gave no declaration; not a hit.

“Give me your name,” the Twi’lek demanded, sliding out from underneath Rey’s second swing.

“Rey,” she panted, her eyes flitting towards Ren. His two hands were gripped tight around his choice of weapon; a warspear. He was fighting another human, winning even without the Force by his side. In the corner of her eye, she saw the Twi’lek before her swing out. Rey stumbled back, her back hitting the dirt. The mace’s flattened spikes ghosted over her shin. Her staff tumbled from her palm.

The Twi’lek approached, holding the mace by its heavy wooden chain. She tilted her head.

“Give me yours,” Rey bit out, rolling onto her stomach, scrabbling in the sand for the staff. A heavy boot pressed hard down on her back. Her yell split through air, the sound jagged and sudden.

“Dia,” said the Twi’lek. Once before, had Rey met this breed of alien. Subservient, the male had been, and quiet to the orders of his master, who preened to the crowd of Niima Outpost at the prize he’d won in a gambling game in a casino.

This female was the fire of Jakku. The sun that blazed overhead. Rey stretched her arm underneath the pressure of the Twi’lek’s foot. Her fingers brushed the staff. The Force thrummed, beating against her ears. The staff trembled and twitched. Rey clenched her fist.

Peroenians—they’d known Ren as a Force user, the enforcer of the First Order, and they’d almost killed him for it. She could not sit idly and assume the Shorak naively held the opposite of whatever their rivals believed.

Rey looked over her shoulder. The Twi’lek raised the mace, high above her head. Rey closed her eyes, bracing herself for the impact.

The weight of the Twi’lek disappeared. She heard a cry, and a thud. Rey hurried to her feet, grabbing the staff. She whirled round. Ren stood before her, within the crowd, his warspear at her feet. Dia lay in the dirt, knocked out.

“Death,” shouted Thassa above the chaos. Rey caught her eye. She would forgive the rescue, once. A crash, of metal and iron together, made her look away.

At the stand, the metal weapons lay scattered. The fair brunette held now the Bimm’s wooden bow and a metal arrow. She tucked the metal arrow into the bow, aiming it. Her target, stood within the melee, was sure. Ren’s head.

Her face stilled. Her mouth formed the shape of one word.

“Tuanul.”

Rey’s staff slipped from her palms. “Kylo!”

Everything went black.


	5. Chapter Four

She woke slowly, blinking against the sunlight. Cheering around her.

“Ukubulala abulale ukumbulala! Ukubulala abulale—” One became indistinguishable from the other. Her arms were pinned above her head. Wide, open space. Arena, she thought dumbly. Her vision swirled. A roar sounded distantly. The cheers increased.

Her vision stilled. The roar loomed again. Gates, too far for her to see exactly, opened. From the perimeter they came. Creatures. Roaring, spitting, snarling creatures.

“Ukubulala!” screamed the ground, clicks in their tongues. All of them, shaped in the colour of sand, their faces formed in the shape of insects.

The creatures skittered, lumbered, hissed, and roared. They sniffed the air. Scenting.

“… You requested, Master—” She lost the words among the crowd and the creatures.

Who she was, her blood the same, felt fear in his bones. The Force flowed, and she was centred, but she wasn’t, she was screaming, rattling the chains—

Then she was among the stars, searching for a lost planet, diving into water that chilled her bones, standing as her brother—her padawan, her life, her master’s dying wish—burned by the lakes of Mustafar—

She saw, he saw, they watched Anakin Skywalker. He raced across the dunes of Tatooine while they sat in the stands. They watched him in the confines of a yacht ship, speak with a girl as young as he yet with wisdom pouring from her fingertips.

He gave her a pendant.

Then he went away, to Coruscant, where beings lived and breathed in confines; even the wealthy. They met again, but the dreams—the dreams didn’t stop—

He married the girl. He loved the girl.

The dreams still didn’t stop.

He killed for the girl. For his children. He fell, for the girl and his children.

She saw him, fallen and ashamed and guilty, repeating what his new master whispered to him and not finding tragedy when he found meaning in the poison.

So much misery, so much pain. This was what made a Jedi. Infinite sadness, with a soft smile. Rey screamed now, in the dark, alone, curled within herself with her hands on her rumbling belly, begging for whoever left her to come back. Finding a flower. If Jakku can grow such things, then maybe it isn’t so bad, maybe her family knew she would be happy here, some day…

Then she floated among the dark of the universe. Her body hung there, slowly dancing among stars that burned before her.

They collapsed in on themselves. One by one, shrinking, shrinking. Until there was no more to see. Only the dark.

Planets below, far below, in this galaxy and the next, living and breathing. They would all become stars. They will become stars. In time. When her flesh and blood is gone. When the Force has taken her, soul and mind into its arms.

The Force sparked, blazed, burned. Light burst forth. It rolled like spreading fire within the energy of the burning stars. It blasted into her flesh, her muscle, her sinew. Every broken part, shattered and made anew.

“It’s so much bigger,”  Luke Skywalker had said. He was right.

She sat now at the mouth of a home once burning, and wearing the colour of the Shorak. The brown tunic, loose around her waist. Reality was melding with the dream. Rey squeezed her eyes tight.

Her arms were wrapped tight with grey binds now. Her white shirt loose, flapping in the desert wind. The boots with which she danced over stone in practiced form.

Smoke trailed into the deep lilac sky from the home. Two suns shone bright beyond dunes. In her hands, the weight of a broken Rebellion pilot’s helmet.

Crossing her legs, she stuck it into the sand.

The desert wind brushed over it.

He will sit by her side, and talk with her.

And he did.

He wore the brown cotton of the Shorak. His knuckles were scuffed from the training.

She watched the setting suns.

“I understand,” said he.

“Do you?” asked she. They, Skywalker and Kenobi, joined by the Force. Destined to play a hand of fate already dealt once before. He laughed, she laughed, and she felt his fingers brush the back of her hand. She turned her palm face-up. He drew idle circles into her skin, drew his thumb over the lines.

Kylo was handsome. That had always been a passing thought, at the back of her head. He favoured his father, had Han’s arrogance and humour, but as she looked closer, when their lightsabers clashed on this planet, that planet, she found a general. Dark eyes, forever searching others and the world around them. Passion, hurt, conviction, sacrifice. Regret and guilt. Every day, since Starkiller, she had felt those in his mind. Heard the voice of Han Solo echoing in his thoughts, especially on the days when he finally dreamt. In his dreams he saw only the lightsaber through a heart. Felt only the rough pilot’s palm cradle his cheek. That alone. Never the promised strength, nor the darkness.

“I’ve tried to understand,” he admitted, amidst the high towers of smoke, “what this is. Why this – link – exists. All I know is what I feel. You, in my head, with nothing hidden. Every moment… I felt it, Rey. You’re scared.”

A tear rolled down her cheek. She laughed, short, sharp.

“You promised to stay out of my head.”

“You promised not to use the Force.”

The icy feeling surrounded her, despite the desert warmth. The grey binds unravelled, leaving only the brown tunic. She looked at him fully.

“What’s happening? Out there?”  _ Out there. _ Like this image around her was a cocoon. Something made of the softest silk she could wrap herself and him within to escape. The two suns could be on any planet; the sand could be any desert. She simply had to imagine. And it would all be so real.

That was the danger of the Force.

“Thassa has condemned us to eternal servitude, in her father’s house. The others are jealous. The Bimm especially,” Kylo added. Rey’s tears broke with another brief laugh.

The use of his name, so intrinsic and yet so apart from ‘Ren’, was foreign to speak. Foreign to even think. Ren represented the First Order, represented the fact that he was her captive and she his captor. But so was ‘Kylo’. That was the fire that trailed smoke over his true name. Kylo was the mask he hid behind. Han Solo had stripped away both, Kylo and Ren, with a single echoing call.

“What will happen, Kylo? If we reach the end of this?” She wondered when “if” had taken over from “when”, when possibility had taken over from inevitability. “I mean – you’re the only one who understands. Truly understands. I don’t want the Force, this –  _ thing _ – within me. But I have it.”

“You would defy everyone if it meant stopping it. Wouldn’t you?”

More tears came, down, down, slipped down her cheeks, however much she clenched her fists and tried to stop.

She shook her head. She wiped her tears from her face. She knew what would happen, eventually. She knew what she was trying to defy. They were enemies.

Enemies did only one thing in war.

“I can’t kill you.”

“I can’t kill you either.”

She snapped her head up. He shrugged, a small smile coming, owning the overdue truth. It was why every battle ended in injury and stalemate. Power did not matter; it hadn’t mattered for a while.

She sighed a small smile.

“Then what do we do?”

A sensation like a boot to her stomach flipped within her body. She was launched back, the two suns a blur, until she hovered in space among a galaxy. Below her, a black hole. Roaring, expanding and shrinking. Constantly in flux.

She looked to her right. Kylo was at her side, still in the colours of the Shorak. He lifted his head and found her eyes. He smiled. Reached forward. She lifted her hand towards his, their fingertips brushing. She breathed, the pain softer.

They stood on the Finalizer together now. Through a viewport, they watched the streak of stars. He still had his scar. Her binds were black, her boots leather. Her fingers gloved. Her loose hair framed her face. Snoke lay at their feet. She kicked his lifeless body with the toe of her boot.  _ He came between us _ , she whispered, linking her fingers with his. Their eyes glowed yellow, their smiles dark and delicious.  _ Never again. _

Then they stood among the quiet crowd of D’Qar. Her hair was scooped into a low bun. A hologram, of another threat, another Resistance, another battle, lit all the familiar faces in blue. He spoke with soft intensity beside her, dressed in the garments of a general, his chin scattered with scruff from late nights dedicated to the cause. His forefinger brushed over her thumb as she breathed, listening to harried arguments around them.

Wind blew on Ahch-To. They stood back-to-back, armed with lightsabers, their Jedi robes flapping against their legs. Faceless enemies advanced with a roar. Such a roar it pounded in her ears, rattled inside her head until the roar was a quiet cry, a whispered thank you and it was him that knelt at her feet. Her lightsaber run through his chest. The final battle.

Trajectories. Winding through the stars, shining through years.

Her mind returned to the burning homestead and his fingertips ghosting over her own.

Rey breathed a sigh. She sank her fingers between the gaps of his, and held on tight.

His scarless face smiled.

“We’re in Station 3Z3 now,” Kylo explained. His mouth tilted with a smile. “They’re ordering me to tell them when you wake.”

“Kylo…”

“Mm.”

Rey breathed. “May I kiss you?”

His smirk became a smile filled with affection. Not with hunger, nor greed. Affection and… relief. His relief flooded Rey, enveloping her in warmth as he enveloped her then, curving his arms around the small of her back in an embrace. He held her close. Her arms slid around his neck, her fingers stroked his nape.

Somewhere within it, the relief the security, she finally pressed her lips to his.

Somewhere within the kiss, she deepened it. Shifting her position so she was knelt before him, she arched her body against his, whispered in his ear and kissed his cheek. Her mouth caressed the edge of his jaw and the line of his neck.

Fucking him would be simple. It wouldn’t be complex, like politics. It wouldn’t be a choice, between Light and Dark like the Jedi. It was just a process where she could simply be. Simply feel. Lost within the Force, she hadn’t felt for so long. Everything had been a mission, a chance to choose her path and win the war. This was just two parts fitting together. Such simplicity was a blessed contrast.

That was what, after all, she had done on Jakku. Processes. Wake, dress, and wash if she could, scavenge, sell, scratch and savour each flavourless portion Unkar gave her. Wake, wash, steal, sell, and scratch. All their own mechanisms with their own routines. Even her hunger was a routine.

Running her fingers over his torso, his body now over hers, she discovered the narrative of Kylo Ren. She traced the scars from former battles. They were white cracks, a jagged map across his skin, as if they had never seen a bacta tank. She was used to such scars. When he removed her tunic, pulling at the belt around her waist, his eyes widened slightly to find she carried them herself.

When an outlander came to Jakku with patches and gel, scavengers would slip into their ships in the dead of night and steal them. Barter for them the next day, fight for their gains. Rey was never one of those scavengers. When beaten, she lay on her cot in her AT-AT and let them heal. She made supports out of scraps rejected and worked when the pain was enough to let her work. Jakku wasn’t a place for healing.

A scar ran along her belly. One of Unkar’s goons, seeking amusement. He’d slashed his whip against her stomach, laughing when she collapsed in the middle of Niima Outpost. Kylo’s thumb traced the faint line of pink flesh, its twisted surface. His eyes flickered up to her, just as his lips pressed a kiss to the tip of it, within the valley of her breasts.

Her fingers ran through his hair in reply. The world zeroed in to his hands sliding underneath her tunic. For a moment, her breath stilled. But this was a dream; no consequences lay here, so she breathed. Kylo continued, edging her trousers from her hips down to her ankles, inch by inch. She peeled them off and settled against the sand. Waiting. Wanting. Desiring.

Her quiet gasps came as he tested her, sliding his finger into her folds, found her wet and waiting—he grinned up at her, boyish to match her giddiness—and kissed her inner thigh.

She shivered, shuddered when he tasted her. The two suns and the desert crumbled around them. They were back within the stars, floating through colour (purple, black, white, sheer white, silver, gold, grey, blue) as he hitched her legs over his shoulders and went deeper.

His tentative touch betrayed a naivety. It told her of gentleness hidden. Seeing it, feeling it course through her body, the pulse of electricity without the Force was intoxicating. Dizzying. Every shout, every jolt and moan as he found new places within her, that bubbled up in her throat, she rolled her hips against his mouth, fucking him as recompense for every sensation he pulled from her body.

He fucked her after that. Filled her as she hooked her arms underneath his armpits, hunkering down on his shoulders, lifting up her hips as his came down until their rhythm was like their heartbeats. Quickened, hurried. Precious to only themselves.

He panted in her ear while his fingers thread into her hair and his free hand caressed her side, threading underneath her back. He hauled her up, a brief break in the rhythm, a hitch in the beat, until she was draped against him, him on his knees and snapping up his hips while she rocked. They shushed one another, swallowed each other’s words with heated kisses. The rhythm became irregular; she panted.

“Kylo – I don’t think – I can’t—”

He understood her, the thread of her sentence in both of their minds. She couldn’t come like this. She needed his body over hers, needed her ankles locked against the small of his back, guiding him to that sweet spot.

She came underneath the guidance of her fingers and his cock, keening with a cry and a sigh. He choked, kissing her neck, her shoulders, her breasts. She caressed his cheek, brought his face to hers. Sliding her palm underneath his jaw, she tilted her head and kissed him.

Softly. Slowly.

Gently.

She held him, as he held her. Every last broken part. Slid his hands over her back. Soothing. Kissed his shoulders.

The Force hummed within their bodies.


	6. Chapter Five

She woke inside a tent, her body curled against itself on a blanket. Half-awake, she blinked until all she could find was her reality. The yellow-gold tent and the scents beyond its boundary. Fresh dew. Grease, oil, machinery. Smells of food she had not yet tried. Her mouth watered. Shorak language, still strange to her ears.

She sat up, and found herself alone.

The entrance of the tent was pushed back, flooding the tent with light. Thassa stepped inside, dropping the tent flap behind her.

She wore robes of crimson red. Short sleeves fluttered around her upper arms. Her skirt carried a split on either side up towards her thighs. She cast an eye over Rey. She nodded to Kylo, stood just behind her.

“The boy told me you were awake. Get up, the day’s short enough as it is.”

Thassa turned on her heel. Kylo bent forward, holding out a hand.

“The dream—” she began, but the sentence died on her tongue. Thassa’s shadow already receded.

“Obey and live, correct?” Kylo said, giving a grin. A smile slid onto her lips. She took Kylo’s hand and stood. Dropping it as soon as she took it, Rey ducked out from the tent.

In her head, she’d thought 3Z3 to be Jakku. Thought the station a cluster like the villages of Jakku. Like Tuanul. She’d known the whispers of what had happened at Tuanul. The First Order, burning homes and rounding up the villagers.

3Z3 heaved people. All of them wore tattoos, and the streets were bright with the multiple colours of their hair. Muscle jostled past muscle, hands shook hands. Bargains were made. There was no space to breathe, no space left unexplored or unclaimed.

Above it all, a structure of duracrete and glass. Its roof was a triangle that swooped in two gracious curves up to a sharp point. Though tall, it did not stand over the station’s stone walls. The rounded walls of the station were sheets of windows. Shorak walked in gossamer and silken robes along white staircases, pausing to gaze down over the market and the streets. They watched the people in brown cotton below with obvious pride.

Thassa walked ahead of them. Eternal servitude. Rey wondered what the true sentence for what they’d done would’ve been. Death perhaps. After all, they had saved each other. A soldier was not supposed to have attachments.

The crowd thinned when they came closer to the station. The people gathered near the station ceased to wear the brown cotton, but yellows, greens, blues alongside the bright shades of hair and the intricate styles. The stairs leading up to the station fanned out in an increasing curve, until the final steps appeared to wrap around the building itself. They were made from white milkstone, a fresh crisp contrast to the earthy paths of the rest of the city. 

Rey kept her head down, keeping a short distance behind Thassa. The milkstone was meticulously kept. The structure wasn’t new. Nothing about this city was new. It was all ancient; the city’s stories were their legends.

It was far from Jakku. If anyone stayed long enough there, their story was swallowed up by the sands.

The doors to the structure were glass, too, and slid open as Thassa approached.

“Little wonder they let the Peroenians believe the station’s carrying a weapon,” Kylo said, following on. “If any Peroenians got past the city walls, there’d be a war.”

“The traders definitely don’t know of this place,” Rey remarked. If Cole and his thugs had, they’d have slit open Thassa’s throat long ago and begun an assault on the city. Honour be damned when they could gain the largest haul of their lives.

Thassa led them through the wide open atrium. The high rounded dome sheltered them. Rey craned her neck back, looking up. They were surrounded by more milkstone and glass. Staircases lined the edge of the dome in a spiral. On each level, a wide bridge stretched across the space of the dome, one overlapping the other. False air blew a cold draft over the atrium floor.

There were no officials, seemingly, no soldiers standing guard.

Rey looked at each Shorak that passed them. Light-skinned, dark-skinned, they all carried strength underneath the satins and the paint.

“No need for guards,” she muttered, and Kylo followed her gaze, “when your people are soldiers already.”

Thassa stopped before a high set of doors, shaped in the form of the station’s roof. At the highest point of the doors, a holo of a planet hovered in iridescent blue.

A keypad stood beside the door. Rey took in other doors visible to her. None of them had the same. Thassa punched in a code, and led them through. Rey followed.

Heated, gnarled lips spat out words at the far end of a long glass table. The most vicious debater was sat at the very head of the table. He carried a tightened square jaw, with green eyes that blazed. A high stiff collar covered the most of his neck, leading down to black tailored robes. His black hair was gelled back. His skin was pale white like the milkstone. Purple veins stuck out at his temple. A leader.

Around him, females and males, all wearing the brightest colours imaginable. They seemed, with their hair and their robes and their jewels, to be trying to stand out. Thassa was a market seller by comparison, wearing no jewels but only her dark red hair and crimson red robes.

The leader spotted her and held up a hand. Circles of gold paint covered his palm and trailed up towards his fingertips.

“Stop!” Each male and female Shorak around him—advisors, maybe—quietened. The leader briefly scanned Rey and Kylo. “So, you’ve brought me The First Order’s enforcer. And a girl. What is your meaning?”

Rey flicked her eyes towards Kylo. There was no pride in his face at the mention of the First Order. Indeed, there was nothing at all.

“They fought badly in the arena. I thought you’d wish to look upon them,” Thassa explained. The leader scoffed. His cloak flapped out behind him as he sat. The other Shorak hurried to do the same, taking their seats around him. Thassa remained standing.

“I doubt as much. If they fight badly in the arena, they die in the arena.” The leader glanced at his gold-painted fingertips. “Their misdemeanour must be worse than that for you to spare them.”

Thassa blinked, but held herself with graceful firmness. She only leaned forward to pick up a datapad from the table, her fingers flicking through pages of information.

“It is not my place to say, is it, Father? Sit,” she said, waving a hand to Rey and Kylo. Her fingers still worked dexterously with the datapad. She sank into a seat at the right hand of the table, far from the other Shorak. Kylo and Rey shared a glance. Her body stiff, Rey swallowed. She quietly sat opposite Thassa, her attention flitting about the room. It was the size of an amphitheatre, but only contained the table and chairs. Where Thassa’s siblings, and her father, sat. Kylo sank into the chair beside her. His palm settled on her thigh.

Thassa spoke again.

“I wonder how Asori is. Pity she is not here.” Her lick of a smile told Rey of affection, and hidden pride. The leader scowled in Thassa’s direction.

“Careful, Thassa.”

Rey swallowed back a gulp. A sibling then and a sore subject. Lost, maybe. Or worse.

Finn. Luke. Rey’s heart sank against her chest. The space left behind as she remembered them ached. She yearned for some way to contact them. What she would say to them, eventually. How she would explain what had happened.

“My name is Talak.” His sneer became a curl of the lip. He looked at them like they were dirt underneath his shoe. “I know of you, Kylo Ren, and of what happened in your appraisal.”

“Saving a human girl instead of himself. I don’t know why Thassa brought them here instead of killing them both. Perhaps her age has skewered her judgement.” The statement came from a well-fed, pampered creature who sat three seats down from his father’s place. He had rings on his slim fingers, and his hair was coloured a sunlit yellow. Its gelled back strands framed his long square-jawed face. Handsome, but without beauty.

Thassa’s attention did not leave her datapad. Out of the corner of her eye, Rey saw Kylo’s mouth move with a smile.

There was a touch of the general about their captor.

“Cowardice is not a rival for age, Tylan,” hissed one of the females, opposite her yellow-haired brother. Hair of a shocking violet surrounded her sweetheart face. Her glare focused sharply on them. “The rules for outlanders apply to all. They fought badly, they must be executed.”

“If they are moved to sentiment enough,” said another Shorak, younger than all his siblings but with the most pinched features and sharing his father’s white skin, “then they should live out their shame. Give them servitude, Father.”

“Death,” repeated the violet-haired female. “I would have executed them on the spot.”

Talak ignored the bickering. He still watched Rey. His contemptuous look flickered down the path of their bodies, hers and Kylo’s.

“I give them another sentence. Neither death nor servitude.” Rey watched Kylo, seeing out of the corner of her eye Talak’s lips spread in a smile. It became a laugh. “I’ve no need for you Kylo Ren, nor your woman. Your sentence is exile. Let the Brintak have you.”

Rey felt Kylo’s hand at her elbow. Letting out a breath, the sound shaking in the still air of the amphitheatre, she rose to her feet. Thassa walked ahead of them, punching in the code. Rey turned her head, smiling as Kylo’s hand threaded into hers. Thassa led them out into the open space of the atrium. The crowd of Shorak within the station had thinned out. All at work, deep in discussion.

“Your clothes are with the tailor in the market. Take them from him, wear them and return our cloth. Then you will continue north through the market, and you won’t stop for anything. Once the gates close behind you, you are no longer under our protection. Stay away from the toroc trees at night, the Brintak are particularly hungry then.” Thassa gave another smile. It was triumphant. “You played your parts well. Thank you.”

She departed then. Rey stood in the quiet.

“I think we were just part of a coup,” Kylo remarked, his smile growing wider when he looked at her.

A shred of comfort bloomed in Rey’s chest. “We were nothing but dolls,” she said, thinking of her pilot, sewn clumsily together. They walked towards the glass. The doors slid open with an easy, quiet hiss. Their hands stuck together tightly while they wove their way through the market.

Now they were free. Free to remember what they had done. A dark feeling stirred in her gut when the gates of Station 3Z3 closed behind them. Dreams were easier than reality, but the consequences were inescapable. Soon, she would have to face them.

* * *

Night reached them and they sought shelter in a shallow valley west of the station. Their robes had been cleaned and repaired by the tailor in the marketplace. No trace of past battles shared. When alone, changing from the brown cloth, Kylo had tugged on his gloves and examined his robes, the thread joining the rip at the lower stomach. Feeling his hands over his belt, his face fell blank.

He should’ve snarled. Should’ve been angry, made plans to replace his stolen tracker with a comms unit, if he could steal one. He brushed his fingers again over the place where once his tracker had been. There was no anger there, inside him. Not even when forced. No spark took, no flame ignited. 

He wondered when fire had been replaced by air.

Shoulders hunched, he stormed through the crowd, finding her standing awkwardly off to the side, her hands held at her waist. She bounced on her heels, growing still when he stood before her.

Though they stood before one another there, as bodies passed, they didn’t speak. Their thoughts were so tangled, it didn’t seem necessary. They merely turned and headed through the crowd towards the doors of 3Z3.

She did speak, however, as she lay beside him in the valley’s grass, underneath the starless sky.

“I know you feel it.”

Kylo flinched. She gave a sad smile, and spoke again.

“Guilt. Every single life. Every single moment spent with the First Order.” Her casual tone, as if she were merely telling him about the stars above, made the words worse. He felt the wind, the soft breeze, rather than the night’s heat.

“You feel it so deeply that if you don’t keep it at bay, you’ll collapse.”

“Leave it alone, scavenger.” She scoffed at his address. Scavenger. After what they had seen, what they had done, he still tried that. He knew such a tactic was pathetic.

Sitting cross-legged beside her, Kylo straightened his shoulders. He found himself watching her, how still she was in the face of the night. He found himself catching her features. The flesh of her mouth, pink. Lips softly closing and parting, considering her next words. The space between her brows, creased with puzzlement and a yearning.

Observations like that were far beyond anything. He felt uneven, unsteady. An infant beginning to walk, wailing whenever he failed. His mind called for a solution.

All he found was her. Her naked form, underneath him, calling for him and begging him to help her reach ecstasy. Maker, but he wanted her. He’d thought giving himself to her would rid him of it. Renew his purpose and pull him back to what he knew.

“You told me you understood,” she said.

“I do understand,” he insisted. “But this is… reality.”

Lies. The whole world was changed. The trajectories, the futures they had seen and felt within the eternal path of the Force, flashed behind his eyes. The knowledge that she had imparted onto him. There was a reason why she spat the word ‘Jedi’ and dismissed the old ways.

The Force was above it.

It was…  _ bigger _ . Nebulous, almost, in its unknowable state. The Force, as they had seen it, was a soul in its own right. Through cycle after cycle, its perfect paths had been torn into pieces by them, the Jedi and the Sith, the two sides warring and feeding it with every triumph and every fall.

He’d looked upon the universe and known.

Using it as a weapon was to trivialise it. To think you could be defined by it would be to wilfully misunderstand it. The Force did not shape anyone. It lived within everyone. It relied on the Light and the Dark. Not one or the other.

_ No _ , screamed his memories. Hiding in his bed, the covers pulled over his body, trying to escape the voice which plagued him, however far he ran.  _ No, the Force is your weapon. It does not define you. They lie, Ben. It defines… _

The memory scratched and hissed. His father’s grin stared down at him.  _ I don’t know what the hell it defines, kid.  _ He sat in the corner of the courtyard in his childhood home, surrounded by sweet-smelling flowers. Han Solo sat in a waistcoat and shirt, with eyes that dimmed with confusion while his son spilled hot tears onto his cheeks. Han Solo rubbed his cheek, shrugging.

_ I can’t explain it. I’m sorry. Maybe you should talk to your mother. _

( _ I’ll comm Uncle Luke. He can come here, and you can talk to him _ , had said his mother with gentle impatience. A holo of a Senator frowned down at him.)

His breaths shook, his fingers trembling when Rey touched him. Cradling his jaw, she drew her thumb over the hollow of his cheek.

“You think of them all the time.”

“You idolise them,” he bit back. His fingers still trembled. He breathed, but that still didn’t calm him. Everything was different, even the shade of her damn eyes. Before they were nothing but a dull brown. Now he looked at them and they were what they always had been: soft, soft ochre. Flared into hazel when they burned in battle.

“Maybe,” she said, her voice dropping to a whisper. Her hand slipped away from his cheek.

Kylo held her wrist. He was gentler than he should’ve been. Instead of pushing her away, he held her hand closer to his skin. He turned his mouth towards her palm. His breath was warm against it. Rey’s breath hitched. “I – I heard enough stories of the smuggler who did the Kessel Run in twelve parsecs,” she murmured.

“Am I still your captive, Rey?” Her name lingered in the air and on his tongue.

“I don’t know what we are.”

Kylo smiled. He softly pushed her hand away from his cheek. She tucked it against her waist, hugging herself tight.

“We’ll continue west as soon as it’s light, towards the canyons.” Her throat bobbed with a gulp, her eyes tilting up towards the sky. “Can’t waste time.”

The rest of the night passed in silence. As he finally fell into sleep, he felt her beside him in the grass. He heard her soft breaths.

For the first time, he slept without dreaming.


	7. Chapter Six

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Many thanks to everyone for reading my anthology piece. Again, be sure to check out the AO3 collection, and [reylofanfictionanthology](http://reylofanfictionanthology.tumblr.com/) on Tumblr for the PDF and the beautiful e-book!

It took three days in all to get to the canyons. Giaca’s sun lit the canyon stone in crystallised yellow. Rey grunted as she threw her arm up, sinking it into the stone. The Force filled her body, urging her to continue.

Beside her, Kylo climbed alongside. Rey adjusted her footing, readying herself. She launched her arm up, finding a holding. She pulled herself up. They were nearing the top of the caves.

The surface of Giaca was far, far below. She looked down, down past her feet at the distant green. The thick toroc trees. Above, the Brintak within couldn’t be heard. She saw the rustle of the treetops as they jumped from branch to branch.

The wind whipped around. Rey spat against the hairs falling on her bottom lip, shaking her head. She climbed faster.

Finally, her palm slammed against the craggy rock. She craned her neck and grinned. The mouth of the cave.

She heaved herself up and stood underneath the roof of the cave, at the line where the sunlight became a shadow.

Kylo, reaching the mouth of the cave soon after, stood at her side. Amongst his confusion, his jumbled thoughts and memories, she felt a brief shot of exhilaration, the same as hers.

“There’ll be a ship in here, no doubt,” Kylo said, the exhilaration fading into determination as he turned on the ball of his foot, heading further into the cave. Rubbing her neck, Rey followed on, falling into step with him.

All along the walls of the caves, entryways led to hollowed out paths and carved steps. Rey narrowed her eyes. Unlit wooden braziers lined those walls, snaking down the path of the steps. As her eyes became accustomed to the gloom, she saw more than scraps. She saw holo projectors, and holo discs, scattered. Remnants and the scent of rotted food; meats and berries.

The toe of her boot brushed against something soft. Rey paused. She sank down to a crouch. Her fingers clasped the item and she stood, peering at it.

Her throat went dry. It was a little doll, with a sewn on face and wearing orange flight gear.

She looked up and found the flash of fire. She gasped, dropping the doll and stumbling backwards. The firelight advanced. Rey remained where she was, blinking and becoming accustomed to the gloom. A female was stood before her, peering at her.

“My name is Asori,” said the female. Wind battered the flame, lighting up her features. She was young, only a few years older than Rey. “Who exactly are you?"

* * *

“I sense the two of you have already encountered my siblings, and my father.” Kylo’s vision blurred as he blinked, coming to. He was surrounded by the dim of a ship’s cockpit, light provided by an orange flame above. It moved in the dark, back and forwards then closer as a face appeared. The face of the woman that he’d found, standing on the ramp of this ship, a ship hidden away at the back of the cave.

She smiled, drawing her palm against his forehead, down his temple. He realised then, that he was on his side, the cockpit floor cold against his skin. His wrists were trapped by a pair of cuffs. Kylo peered around the cargo bay. Its design carried influence of the Empire, but was clearly an independent vessel. A smuggler’s vessel.

“Sorry for the cuffs,” said the woman, releasing him. Kylo groaned as he moved, trying to sit up. He felt Rey’s hands on his shoulder, guiding him up. Righted, sinking his head against the cockpit wall, Kylo sighed.

“Do you need light? That’s the one thing this ship can do,” the woman said with a laugh. A flick of a switch, or the press of a button, and the cockpit flooded with white light, harsh enough that he winced. “Again,” continued the woman, settling into the pilot seat. “I apologise for the cuffs. It has been a long time since anyone but myself has been within this cave. And a Shorak must defend their territory.”

Rey had not left his side, but knelt beside him, her hand still on his shoulder. Kylo ran his eyes over the woman sitting in the pilot seat before them. The controls were long unused. Perhaps even without the correct parts, going by her words.

The woman had the Shorak muscle and tattoos. The most prominent was on her face; covering the right side, a tangle of leaves and veins, the bronze-shaded paint framed her purple eyes and crawled across the bridge of her nose. Her cheeks were arched, her shaven hair brown. No silk, no leather. Coarse wool only. Around her hip, a holster. Attached to it were a dagger and a blaster.

Force sensitive. The isolation rolled off of her in waves.

Kylo ran his eyes over the cockpit floor. From broken open crates spilled old weapons and older ship parts. Kylo quirked an eyebrow, sweeping his attention back up to the woman.

She looked at Rey, who was stoic while the woman peered at her—examined her. She was trying to deduce them both. Their strengths, weaknesses. The reasons why she should keep them alive.

Rey was good at surviving, but he could do it just as well.

Kylo dipped inside her head.

Asori, daughter of Talak. Twenty five and banished a year cycle ago. Separated from a child, a wife. She possessed a hatred for the Shorak, her own species. A hatred for her siblings—

“Stop it!” Asori hissed, eyes blazing and stood, looming over him. “I feel you in my mind, Jedi, and that is not your place. Do that again, and I’ll do worse than simply cuff you.”

“We are not Jedi,” Rey said, breaking her silence, edging into the fray. “We are banished, just like you, from 3Z3. Under the orders of your father.”

Asori mellowed, but her jaw remained tight, her hackles raised, her whole body alert. She dropped to a crouch before them, her fingertips pressed together. Her eyes flicked between them both. They settled on Rey.

“I kept my skills, my power, under lock and key. Deep down within my body, my heart.” She poked her chest. Sadness flooded her eyes, but she carried no tears. Only a weight. “Here. Then somebody threatened my wife, my child. A Peroenian.”

Asori spat the name. Her sadness hardened, determination swallowing it up. Spitting it out, her tone changing. “I was not going to sit back and let them be taken, kidnapped and taken off my planet, their home, so they could be sold as slaves. I saved them with my power. In return, my father and my siblings voted for my exile. They were kind enough not to consider execution. I see they gave you that kindness.”

“Thassa pushed hard for that mercy,” Kylo said slowly, watching as Asori’s face shifted again, slowly, gradually transforming into a smile. Groaning, she stood. She righted the crates, beginning to throw weapons and parts into them.

“Apologies for the mess,” she said as she worked. She paused when she found a comms unit, feeling its weight in her hand. She scratched the nape of her neck, giving a short, soft laugh. The sound was traced with affection. “Thassa gave you mercy. My sister is only merciful when it suits her agenda.”

“We gathered that,” Rey said, slipping Kylo a smile. Then she stood. Took a step towards the cockpit. Asori moved fast, aiming her blaster at Rey. Kylo darted up, fist clenching.

“This is an Allanar N3, isn’t it?” Rey asked, quietening them both. Asori kept her blaster aimed, but her grip relaxed. Her shoulders sank, her eyebrows tilting up in surprise. “Three engines, multiple laser cannons. And none of it works. You’ve tried, but you need help.”

Rey frowned. Her head tilted just slightly to the left. There was grace in her quietness, gravity in her low, curious tone.

“You need help to get off Giaca.”

“I don’t need your influence,” Asori hissed. Her grip tightened, the silence grew taut, shifted closer around them. Kylo sank back into the shadows. This woman was frightened. He didn’t need to dip inside her head to see she had lived the last year cycle hidden away, wasting away her thoughts on a half-formed plan.

“I’m just saying the truth,” Rey said, insistent. “Do you truly mean it? You would leave your family?”

“She has no choice,” Kylo said from the shadows. Rey turned her head, staring at him. Slowly, he stood. He kept his attention between the two women before him. “Do you? You’ve barely thought about them since your banishment. Because you feel if you do – your anger will be so great, you fear who you will become if you relinquish yourself to it.”

As was the same with every creature, every human living within the universe. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Rey, stoic and still in the face of his words.

“So what are you hoping for? You help me build this ship, and I make some room for passengers? Hundreds of civilisations have tried to make something of Maruuk’s Nook. I wouldn’t know where to start. The crates you see here? Lucky breaks, courtesy of clumsy Peroes.”

“Useful then, to have another two pairs of eyes.” Rey stepped forward, her smile warm but firm. Asori looked between them. Her glare faded, the lines in her brow folded back into a smooth air of examination. Consideration, like they were once more about to become fighters, and it was her sister looking upon them.

She hooked her blaster against her belt. “First sign of trouble, I’ll be delivering you to the Brintak.”

* * *

The first battle they faced after Starkiller had crumbled, when they fought on the sand of a planet far from the Resistance and the First Order, Rey had known then that Kylo Ren was as much of a survivor as she. He had faced her on that nameless planet. He had triumphed over her, held his spitting, crackling lightsaber above her chest where she lay. She had closed her eyes, listened to the sound of the planet’s black water, waited.

“There is no triumph in killing you here, scavenger,” he’d whispered in her ear, mask off and his breath hot on her neck. Then he had left her.

He stood now in the small quarters Asori had given to them with his hands folded behind his back, like a soldier who had not yet fought any wars, or indeed, any battles. Rey sank onto the one bunk, crossing her legs, smudging her thumb across her bottom lip. Her eyes flicked between him and the floor.

So much had happened. Their battles were another world, leading them down one path amongst many. In one, she wore black and held his hand while the universe burned. In others, they fought to save those same stars.

The Force simmered underneath her skin all this while. At the beginning, it had been encased within her, blooming when she struck hard and dodged quickly. A weapon used for good. Then she had witnessed how others had worshipped the Force, how Luke Skywalker now worshipped the Force. It moved beyond weaponry, beyond her arsenal. It began to surround her.

Then she had run. Run from it all, leading him through galaxies at the request of General Organa.

“Let him find you,”  the general had said.

“My mother ordered it?” Rey snapped her head up when he spoke, her mouth dropping open, but Kylo shook his head. “Your thoughts are my thoughts, Rey.”

So long had he called her scavenger. There was a strange sort of familiarity to the way he said her name. Within it, there was the voice of his mother, his father and a name only General Organa spoke. A name Han Solo had used, and had almost brought his defences crashing down.

She had seen it once, when his guard had been let down and she was asleep on some nameless rock in the Outer Rim, waiting for him to find her. He would find her the next day, the sky a brilliant blue as they fought. A fitful sleep, cramped and cold in a hidden part of the Finalizer. She’d felt his confusion in her own dream. Her dream, of another day on Jakku, had melded with his, the vision of his father’s arm around him, whispering it was okay while his lightsaber tumbled into the light of Starkiller Base. More than anything, she had felt, when he woke, his desire for it to be real. His fear that Snoke would discover it.

So she had taken it from him. Snatched it from his memory before Snoke had a chance to find it.

Looking up at Kylo, in the cramped quarters of this Allanar N3 freighter, Rey knew that her thoughts had flooded into his. That he knew of her gift.

Kylo frowned. He walked towards her, stopping when he loomed over her.

“Why?”

Rey swallowed thickly. “I didn’t…” Her voice dropped to a whisper. “I didn’t want you to die.”

“Not by your hand?” A quirk of a smile appeared on his lips. Her heartbeat pulsed rapidly against her ribcage.

“Not at all,” she admitted.

At once, he was fallen before her on his knees. He tugged at his gloves with his teeth, dropping them on the ship floor. He pushed her legs apart, settling between them, smoothing his hands over her shins.

“Kylo, wait.” She pressed a hand to his chest. His eyes sharpened from their determined gaze. Rey felt his heart beating underneath her palm. This was the consequence of their dream, the utmost consequence: she wanted him.

Easy to avoid desire when there are obstacles to be overcome, negotiations to be made. Now they were alone, and this was one truth among many. Rey looked into his dark brown eyes, heavy with the same wanting.

“Rey…” His call of her name was a low whisper. He leant forward, smoothing his palm underneath the line of her jaw, sinking his fingers into her hair. He tilted his head, as if to kiss her. She parted her lips, ready for the touch, the taste of him—he drew back, still holding onto her jaw in that gentle way, sighing.

Suddenly, his mind was open to her in a way it had never been before. There were walls put up that she couldn’t knock down, and doors opened where once they had been closed. One wall crumbled, showing her how he’d slept as a child, fitfully and tearfully as the shadow whispered in his ear. The shadow disappeared when his mother cuddled him and kissed his temple, and when his father squeezed his shoulder, smiling down at him, bringing him into a tight cuddle. Hauling him onto his lap.

Through one door, she saw the Knights of Ren, at training. Beating one another until blood flowed and  victory confirmed. But never quite enough. As long as he was training, Snoke would be by his side. Never quite trusted. The first seed of doubt planted, brushed away, but not uprooted.

Then another wall crumbled. Rey stood before herself in the flurry of snow, a shining beam of Light, unknowing of how powerful she was. Rey’s throat grew dry. Her lightsaber, crackling red, spun between her fingers. Snoke ordered her to bring him the girl. But Light or Dark, this girl before her, scared but with power trembling through her veins, is destined for legend. Rey wanted to teach her, teach her what Skywalker had taught her—how to tap into the Force, how to embrace it, lessons she used even now, when Snoke kept her bleeding and broken.

“You grew that seed,” murmured Kylo, within the cramped quarters. He gave a smile. No arrogance, no delight. No reluctance. “You made it bloom.”

She thought of the flower on Jakku. If such a beautiful thing could grow in such a harsh world, she had decided, there must be hope.

Rey tucked her fingers against his chin, bringing Kylo Ren closer.

“If this is real,” she said, her lips only a singular moment from his, “then kiss me.”

He pressed his lips to hers.

“Rey,” he sighed against her mouth.

“Ben,” she whispered.

No longer Ren, no longer a scavenger. They were both reborn now; into what, that was yet to be known, but she felt something stir within the Force, within her lifeblood and his—

It resembled hope.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And thus, the end. If you're wondering what happens beyond this point, then I can announce that I am working on a sequel filled with more exploration of the Force, family, battles and maybe even a happy ending or two... 
> 
> So let's end on those three little words:
> 
> To be continued!


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